Beki Basch: Take me through a typical week. Do you make work full-time, do you teach?

Dan Steinhilber: I make work full-time. I don’t teach anymore. I used to adjunct at George Mason and a few other area schools. You know, just the usual classes, but that’s not for me though.

Basch: I read that you started out with painting and drawing. Could you talk about the transition you made from perhaps 2-dimensional work to what you are making now.

Steinhilber: Hmmm.... Let me think how that started. Well I was making drawings and paintings in school and I just felt like the end result, the object in the end, that was sort of disappointing. This thing I was making lacked the experience of the work. What I really enjoyed was more the process of making the work, of mixing the colors together. I was doing mainly observational drawing and painting at the time, in school in Wisconsin. When I finished school I took my van and drove all over the West Coast eventually landing in central coastal California. It was really nice. Outside all the time, I even had a little vegetable garden. I would go out into nature and experiment with my drawings and paintings. I was trying to reach a place where I just felt I could merge drawing with being somewhere. So the first reaction for me was even just to put the canvas on the ground. I would start really simple with just one or two colors and paint these panels and then just place them around me in different spaces.

Basch: So, sort of like early sculpture?

Steinhilber: Or, yeah, maybe like installation art. I was doing some things In school where I had easels on

wheels and I had this thing where I was going back and forth and drawing on all of them interchangeably. So that was one thing I did that maybe led me to work more with process and less of the final product.

Basch: I saw some drawings or maybe they were paintings that you made not too long ago that looked like they were more based on process and perhaps a sculpture making the product. Do you still do some drawing or painting?

Steinhilber: I do drawings now sometimes. Just to plan something out. It helps to imagine things into being. Sometimes I have to make a model though, just to see how things will work in the end. But you never really know until you make it.

Basch: So that was your transition? Sort of wanting things to feel more present and engaging.

Steinhilber: Yeah and in California I was using these color combinations and nature and things that game me a feeling or an image and reflected the space I was in. So now living in a urban setting, it’s the same thing. I have a studio in a warehouse building that does wholesale and it’s just shrink wrap and-

Basch: Duck sauce?

Steinhilber: Yeah duck sauce. That’s my neighbor actually. But it’s all this industrial stuff around me and my

work is just reflecting my environment.

Basch: So when you talk about the process and the presence as the thing which interests you more than the final result, how do you feel that the process of the work is continued through the viewer and their engagement with it. I am specifically thinking the work in this show or the piece ‘Reflecting Room’ where viewers are surrounded in... Mylar?

Steinhilber: Yeah, that’s right. I think for me, seeing the work and making the work is about slowing down. It feels like we don’t really get much chance to do that anymore and I like that we can take the time to do it with the work. It seems to get harder and harder to get people to look for longer.

Basch: Most of your pieces are ‘untitled’.

Steinhilber: Yeah, that goes with wanting people to engage more. I feel like if you give them a title, that’s this little bit of information and then they just want more and more. I’d rather than the text, that they just look.

Basch: Ah, well that answers my question about why you don’t have a website.

Steinhilber: Yeah. I also just have trouble with photographs.

Basch: But your photos of your pieces are so nice!

Steinhilber: Well, I didn’t take those, but I feel like even with the photograph, people are just not experiencing it as well. The photograph trumps the experience. There is this tragic sense of taking the snapshot- and everybody these days participates in it- to preserve that moment. They are eager to make a quick object out of an experience. These sculptures are temporal, ephemeral. They’re not going to be around forever. Like life, they speak to our own temporality.

Basch: Working this way with the ‘everyday’ how often does it happen that your tools become your materials?

Steinhilber: Well actually it’s funny you should ask because I make my own specialized tools all of the time. My assistant says I could have a show just out of the tools I make, but most of them have not been worth keeping because they were just too specific. Like the hot griddle shoes. They were heated aluminum attached to 2”x4”’s that had Velcro overtop so I could strap them on and walk along a seam to seal an inflatable. I like making the tools so much because there’s this engineering aspect to it; a problem that needs to be solved.

Basch: I have a few rapid fire questions for you now. Sort of the pop-star interview: Favorite food?

Steinhilber: Pizza. Hahaha.

Basch: Vacation destination?

Steinhilber: Well, I’m going to Laos next weekend to do a piece.

Basch: Childhood aspirations?

Steinhilber: I wanted to be garbage man. I liked the idea of riding on the back of the truck.

Basch: Well you’re not too far off now... How about your idea of a perfect Saturday?

Steinhilber: Tennis. Actually I’m going to play tennis today with my friend. The perfect Saturday would be tennis, and an awesome backyard BBQ.